Small local groups can help us on the ground

The meaning of peak oil and climate change point inexorably toward relocalization and transition. Relocalization is challenging because we're looking at profound change in our own lives and in the society's - a perfect storm! To look at, feel, uncover, and move into the change we need - and to be with others as they do - it'll be great to have from a micro-climate in which there's room for us to safely explore the options and move into them. Without it we're we're too subject to the groupthink of the prevailing story around us, business as usual.

I've hugely benefited from groups myself. but despite quite a bit of group experience, I'm not in a group that gives me all of this.

But a place to start is an Open Source Relocalizing Group - Open Source because it takes elements that work and puts them together, invites your participation in making them better. A starting format for it is here: www.radicalrelocalization.com/open-source-groups.php. I just put it out today and thought of sharing it with evolver. Check it out and take it for a test run if you like :-)

We're made for small groups I think, evolved in tribes and kinship alliances; always together with a group of others. Many of the daily - and key - decisions we made were in groups. Like being on a trip through the wilderness with the decision about when to move on before you. Everyone has a say on what to do and the decision gets made with multiple heartfelt input. That's just how it worked! For our million year evolutionary heritage as humans, our allegiances were to a group, a system, like this. That's part of how we operated and it's part - not the whole but a part - of how we operate still. Click here for my essay on the evolutionary imperative groups that have room for our collective and individual selves.

I'm still in a group I've been in for almost 20 years (and I'm in more than one). When the group comes together, there's a sense that we're all in this together . . . this "whatever it is," nameless thing. We're connected but not diminished, collectively responsible for what transpires.

Our personal and private understandings - on the meditation cushion for example - don't all by themselves build community or change the world. It's the public conversation about a new possibility that's the birth of something new, especially face-to-face with our neighbors. When that new possibility is spoken aloud there we become responsible for it; if we don't walk away, something will be required of us to bring it into being.

That's commitment and how change can happen. Have a peek: http://www.radicalrelocalization.com/open-source-groups.php